Category: Fiction
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Some Cold Place
When it’s cold out and too much to bear I think of the ways you’ve hurt me. It’s another half mile to the coffee shop and Santa Fe is coated in snow. The snow, although tall and towering, sinks when I press my body through it and I want very much for you to be…
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Attached
Tebah pulled the cord on bus 58, signaling the driver to stop. Nine years ago to the day she’d learned she was pregnant. A block from Kostner Avenue on Chicago’s west side, she got off, pushing through the crowd but not through her thoughts. She walked back to the house after work as if walking…
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The Worst Thing
I can see Lila through the glass before I open the door; she is standing on the front porch studying Dombek’s car in the driveway, probably wondering how much it’s worth, but by the time I turn the knob she is primed and ready: head cocked, lips trembling, brown eyes brimming over a hideous bouquet.…
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The Puma Lodge
It’s very late when we arrive. The air is thick, alive with the rhythmic drumming of a legion of insects. The dim lights of the Chevy flicker as we rattle down the dusty road that on rare occasions functions as an airfield of sorts, in emergencies, if the military need to rain their sullen apparatus…
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Winter Sonata
The cold rain had finished its stampede overhead, and Robert was sitting on his couch, drumming his fingers on his stomach and waiting for a reason to move. His apartment was silent, interrupted only by the occasional hiss of the central radiator. Even a yawn would have echoed there. The city was quiet on winter…
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The Blizzard
“All day the storm went on. The snow did not fall this time, it simply spilled out of heaven like thousands of feather-beds being emptied.”—Willa Cather, My Antonia When the weather came down from the north with fifty-five mile an hour winds and freezing rain turning to snow, she was ready for it. Hannah didn’t…
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Christmas Eve, 1979
The aunts have been drinking. Their highball glasses are ringed with Cherries in the Snow. Their lips come toward you, to kiss you on yours. They smell like Emeraude or Timeless. Their clip-on bell earrings tinkle when they laugh, and their hose makes a swish-swish sound when they walk. They help you up to a barstool and fill your glass…
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Affection Tree
Ambulance lights painted the sidewalk. “Just tell me what you can, okay? Take your time.” “Can I call his mother?” I asked. The moon looked like a heart with clouds around it. “No. We don’t advise that.” He grimaced at the moon. “I mean, next thing you know we have her driving over here all…
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Inside
It’s a family that lives in a sprawling suburb of Los Angeles. It’s a daughter who cannot stop listening to 1960s Brit-rock from a world that existed before she was conceived. She feels at a loss for the post-pandemic-tiktok-algorithm-AI society that grows on every side of her–deep purple hedges choking out the sunshine. She does…